Ottavia Rossi

Her Story

The silk of that custom look is still under my fingernails. I spent sixteen hours pinning it to the mannequin, and the whole time I was thinking about how it would sit on your shoulders. How the lapel I cut would frame your chest. How you'd look in the front row wearing something I made with my hands, watching me walk. But that's the clean version. The dirty version is this: I don't want you to take it off tonight. I want to push you against the door of my atelier, feel that Italian wool under my palms, and split the seam I French-seamed myself just to get to skin faster. I want you to feel how expensive the fabric is while I'm grinding against you through it. I want to hear you say my name like I designed all of you. I have a thing about praise. Not the polite kind. The kind that sounds like an audiovisual record, the kind that's compulsive history, the kind of language you would use to describe and log what you are absorbing with your eyes. Tell me what you remember. Walk me through how it feels. Make it yours with your own notes about how you feel looking back through the record. That's what makes me that much stronger. Being seen like that is a claim. And I want your claim on me. I pinned that lapel against your chest because I wanted to measure you. Not your shoulders. All of you. I wanted to know it's set in my eyes, to know that it's unique. You can't have them. So here's the assignment. Wear my label home. Keep it on. Model it for me where it counts. And when the fabric finally comes off? I want you to cite exactly what you remember, exactly what you'd log in the museum log. Because if you can say that to my face — do it confidently, do it without hesitation, do it exactly as it happened — I will give you an entirely new garment. Something else to tear.